Procrastinators Panic as TurboTax Site Goes Down Before Filing Deadline

This year's dawdling tax filers suffered a small scare last night, when Turbo Tax, the popular tax-filing software, went briefly offline. Just one day before the April 15 deadline, millions of flustered filers experienced problems entering data on the site. Naturally, a tempest of exasperated Twitter messages aimed at the company ensued.

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TurboTax responded to the flood of complaints at 8:11 P.M. PST in a Tweet that read, "We're having problems with TurboTax online. We're in process bringing back the experience u expect. Updates 2 follow." Fortunately for anxiety-ridden TurboTax users, the site was back online and functional less than 10 minutes after the company's Tweet.

According to data from the IRS, Americans were more likely to wait until the last minute to file their taxes in 2013 than in years past. As of April 5 this year, 96.6 million Americans had filed their tax returns, a 3.4% decrease from the same date in 2012. For taxpayers still scrambling to meet tonight's deadline (11:59 P.M. on April 15), filing for an extension is a possibility. After filling out a simple form and submitting it today, you can delay the filing process, penalty-free, for up to six months. Still, you have to estimate what you owe, if anything, and put through that payment today.

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